ENGLISH
'The work Magic City is a newly constructed Armenian past of today's everyday material. I have used things, mainly foods, that surround me in my everyday life to build miniature buildings and cities. With this, I align myself with my need to understand and rebuild Armenian architecture. Of course this is not respectfully executed architectural research. Right now it is my interest to stage everyday objects dramatically in relation to researching this highly charged art of construction of the past. During the genocide of the Armenians in the Osman Empire from 1915 on (and also during the massacres in the 19th century where hundreds of thousands of people perished) all belongings
of the Armenians were systematically either destroyed, or annected. The buildings, especially the sacral ones, were landmarks and manifestations of Armenian culture. Today, there are many ruins and restored churches left in many countries of the former Soviet Union and other places, but these are mainly singular buildings, not complete cities of Armenian character, like you can see in old photographs.
The Magic City was invented by the British author Edith Nesbit, who gained popularity in the late 19th and early 20th century with her children's books, the Psammead-Trilogy being a notable example. One of her stories follows two children who use everyday objects to build miniature cities, who are shrinked by magic and proceed to live through a string of adventures in their own city. Responding to reader letters by children and their parents, Edith Nesbit published a pedagogical-socio-political pamphlet disguised as a How-to guide to building Magic Cities. Her idea underlies the notion that a preoccupation with shapes elicits a deeper pedagogical engagement with ones own surrounding world.

For me the building of Magic Cities provides an opportunity to interact with the Armenian past.
I feel what my legacy is as a descendent of my murdered, fleeing, impoverished and never atoned for relatives. I feel every day the price that my family paid to enable my assimilation to the majority society, and what I have gained in return. The Armenian city that I create is speculative; it is assembled with foods and out of different contexts that I regularly stride through and that are born out of my own, new, self-designed identity. Japanese pancakes, turkish bread, gingerbread and claycasts I made from advent calendar chocolates. The banality and the singularity that I exist, and my relatives had to die meet in the Magic City.'